The Painted Word
The Painted Word
PEOPLE DON'T READ THE MORNING NEWSPAPER, MAR-
shall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm
bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York
City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I
was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that
spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River
Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New
York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in Arts &
Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory
deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing
happened:
I noticed something/
Yet another clam·broth·colored current had begun
2
The Painted Word
to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf
Stream ... a review, it was, by the Times's dean of the
arts, Hilton Kramer, of an exhibition at Yale University
of "Seven Realists," seven realistic painters ... when I
was jerked alert by the following:
"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather
conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the
nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art,
to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial-the means by which our experience of individual
works is joined to our understanding of the values they
signify."
Now, you may say, My God, man! You woke up over
that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell
in the sea of words?
But I knew what I was looking at. I realized that
without making the slightest effort I had come upon
one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or
Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the
words in passing, that give the game away.
What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The
New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today,
"to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial." I read it again. It didn't say "something helpful"
or "enriching" or even "extremely valuable." No, the
word was crucial.
In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go
with it, I can't see a painting.
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the
Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary
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3
was revealed to me for the first time. The fogs
lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshots, and Murine agonies fell away!
All these years, along with countless kindred souls, I
am certain, I had made my way into the galleries of Upart
Courtesy Museum of Fine Artr, Boston
Jean Fran~ois Millet, The Sower ( 1850-51 ).
At the time Millet was considered something of a rip,
because he painted such low Rent folk. Only later was
this called "literary" or "narrative" art
4
The Painted Word
per Madison and Lower Soho and the Art Gildo Midway of Fifty-seventh Street, and into the museums,
into the Modern, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim,
the Bastard Bauhaus, the New Brutalist, and the Fountainhead Baroque, into the lowliest storefront churches
and grandest Robber Baronial temples of Modernism.
All these years I, like so many others, had stood in
front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-howmany thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans,
Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses,
Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now
popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back,
now moving closer-waiting, waiting, forever waiting
for ... it . .. for it to come into focus, namely, the visual
reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which
everyone (toutle monde) knew to be there-waiting for
something to radiate directly from the paintings on
these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this
moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in
short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing
is believing. Well-how very shortsighted! Now, at
last, on April28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not "seeing is believing," you ninny, but
"believing is seeing," for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to
illustrate the text.
'
Like most sudden revelations, this one left me dizzy.
How could such a thing be? How could Modern Art be
literary? As every art-history student is told, the Modern movement began about 1900 with a complete rejection of the literary nature of academic art, meaning the
The Painted Word
5
sort of realistic art which originated in the Renaissance
and which the various national academies still held up
as the last word.
Literary became a code word for all that seemed
hopelessly retrograde about realistic art. It probably
referred originally to the way nineteenth-century
painters liked to paint scenes straight from literature,
such as Sir John Everett Millais's rendition of Hamlet's
intended, Ophelia, floating dead (on her back) with a
bouquet of wildflowers in her death grip. In time, literary came to refer to realistic painting in general. The
idea was that half the power of a realistic painting
comes not from the artist but from the sentiments the
viewer hauls along to it, like so much mental baggage.
According to this theory, the museum-going public's
love of, say, Jean Franc;ois Millet's The Sower has little
to do with Millet's talent and everything to do with people's sentimental notions about The Sturdy Yeoman.
They make up a little story about him.
What was the opposite of literary painting? Why,
/'art pour /'art, form for the sake of form, color for the
sake of color. In Europe before 1914, artists invented
Modern styles with fanatic energy-Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Orphism, Supermatism,
Vorticism-but everybody shared the same premise:
henceforth, one doesn't paint "about anything, my dear
aunt," to borrow a line from a famous Punch cartoon.
One just paints. Art should no longer be a mirror held
up to man or nature. A painting should compel the
viewer to see it for what it is: a certain arrangement of
colors and forms on a canvas.
Artists pitched in to help make theory. They loved it,
6
The Painted Word
in fact. Georges Braque, the painter for whose work the
word Cubism was coined, was a great formulator of
precepts:
"The painter thinks in forms and colors. The aim is
Museum of Fine Arts, Bem, the Hermann and Margrit Rupf Collection
Georges Braque, Houses at I'Estaque ( 1908) .
But not really houses, said Braque ; rather, a certain
arrangement of colors and forms on a canvas . ("little
cubes," said Matisse to the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who
called Braque's new style "Cubism," thinking it a prize
put-down .) The Theory starts here
The Painted Word
T
not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a
pictorial fact."
Today this notion, this protest-which it was when
Braque said it-has become a piece of orthodoxy.
Artists repeat it endlessly, with conviction. As the Minimal Art movement came into its own in 1966, Frank
Stella was saying it again:
"My painting is based on the fact that only what can
be seen there is there. It really is an object ... What you
see is what you see."
Such emphasis, such certainty! What a head of
steam-what patriotism an idea can build up in threequarters of a century! In any event, so began Modern
Art and so began the modern art of Art Theory.
Braque, like Frank Stella, loved theory; but for Braque,
who was a Montmartre boho* of the primitive sort, art
came first. You can be sure the poor fellow never
dreamed that during his own lifetime that order would
be reversed.
Twentieth-century American slang for bohemian; obverse of hobo.
Hot off the Carey airport bus, looking for lofts
chapter
The apache dance
A
LL THE MAJOR MODERN MOVEMENTS EXCEPT FOR
de Stijl, Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism began before the First World War, and yet they all
seem to come out of the 1920s. Why? Because it was in
the 1920s that Modern Art achieved social chic in Paris,
London, Berlin, and New York. Smart people talked
about it, wrote about it, enthused over it, and borrowed
from it. Borrowed from it, as I say; Modern Art
achieved the ultimate social acceptance: interior decorators did knockoffs of it in Belgravia and the sixteenth
arrondissement.
Things like knock-off specialists, money, publicity,
the smart set, and Le Chic shouldn't count in the history of art, as we all know-but, thanks to the artists
themselves, they do. Art and fashion are a two-backed
10
The Painted Word
beast today; the artists can yell at fashion, but they can't
move out ahead. That has come about as follows:
By 1900 the artist's arena-the place where he seeks
honor, glory, ease, Success-had shifted twice. In
seventeenth-century Europe the artist was literally, and
also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and
the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court
art were one and the same. In the eighteenth century
the scene shifted to the salons, in the homes of the
wealthy bourgeoisie as well as those of aristocrats,
where Culture-minded members of the upper classes
held regular meetings with selected artists and writers.
The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius.
After the French Revolution, artists began to leave the
salons and join cenacles, which were fraternities of likeminded souls huddled at some place like the Cafe
Guerbois rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist rather than a socialite, someone
like Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier, Theophile Gautier,
or, later, Edouard Manet. What held the cenacles together was that merry battle spirit we have all come to
know and love: epatez la bourgeoisie, shock the middle
class. With Gautier's cenacle especially ... with Gautier's own red vests, black scarves, crazy hats, outrageous pronouncements, huge thirsts, and ravenous
groin ... the modern picture of The Artist began to
form: the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only
to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the
bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bourgeoisie, to be
whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line
wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way
The apache dance
II
they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever-in short, to be the bohemian.
By 1900 and the era of Picasso, Braque & Co., the
modern game of Success in Art was pretty well set. As
a painter or sculptor the artist would do work that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality. As
an individual-well, that was a bit more complex. As a
bohemian, the artist had now left the salons of the upper classes-but he had not left their world. For getting
away from the bourgeoisie there's nothing like packing
up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even
Brittany, which was Gauguin's first stop. But who else
even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no
farther than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?-perhaps two miles from the
Champs Elysees. Likewise in the United States: believe
me, you can get all the tubes ofWinsor & Newton paint
you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating
to New York all the same ... You can see them six days
a week ... hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up in
front of the real-estate office on Broome Street in their
identical blue jeans, gum boots, and quilted Long
March jackets ... looking, of course, for the inevitable
Loft ...
No, somehow the artist wanted to remain within
walking distance ... He took up quarters just around
the corner from ... le monde, the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find
it important to be in fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers, writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be "where
J2
The Painted Word
Copyright Ronald Searle, 1961
Ronald Searle, La Vie de Boheme
things happen," the glamorous but small world of that
creation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le
monde, Everybody, as in "Everybody says" ... the smart
set, in a phrase ... "smart," with its overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism.
The ambitious artist, the artist who wanted Success,
now had to do a bit of psychological double-tracking.
Consciously he had to dedicate himself to the antibourgeois values of the cenacles of whatever sort, to bohemia, to the Bloomsbury life, the Left Bank life, the
Lower Broadway Loft life, to the sacred squalor of it
all, to the grim silhouette of the black Reo rig Lower
Manhattan truck-route internal-combustion granules
The apache dance
J3
that were already standing an eighth of an inch thick
on the poisoned roach carcasses atop the electric hotplate burner by the time you got up for breakfast ...
Not only that, he had to dedicate himself to the quirky
god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye
peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of
the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall's avant-garde Breakthrough
of the Century ... all this in order to make it, to be noticed, to be counted, within the community of artists
themselves. What is more, he had to be sincere about it.
At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to
see if anyone in le monde was watching. Have they noticed me yet? Have they even noticed the new style (that
me and my friends are working in)? Don't they even
know about Tensionism (or Slice Art or Niho or Innerism or Dimensional Creamo or whatever)? (Hello, out
there!) ... because as every artist knew in his heart of
hearts, no matter how many times he tried to close his
eyes and pretend otherwise (History! History!-where is
thy salve?), Success was real only when it was success
within le monde.
He could close his eyes and try to believe that all that
mattered was that he knew his work was great ... and
that other artists respected it ... and that History
would surely record his achievements ... but deep
down he knew he was lying to himself. I want to be a
Name, goddamn it!-at least that, a name, a name on the
lips of the museum curators, gallery owners, collectors,
patrons, board members, committee members, Culture
hostesses, and their attendant intellectuals and journal-
14
The Painted Word
ists and their Time and Newsweek-all right!--even
that!-Time and Newsweek-Oh yes! (ask the shades
of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko!)-even the goddamned journalists!
DURING THE 1960S THIS ENTIRE PROCESS BY WHICH LE
monde, the culturati, scout bohemia and tap the young
artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic way.
Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of
Modern Art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller, would
head downtown from the Museum on West Fifty-third
Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome
Street and environs, and tour the loft studios of known
artists and unknowns alike, looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was new
and significant in order to put together a show in the
fall ... and, well, I mean, my God-from the moment
the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third Street to
grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record
their sortie ... They're coming! ... And rolling across
Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic Pulse of the
theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:
Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick
me . .. 0 damnable Uptown!
By all means, deny it if asked !-what one knows, in
one's cheating heart, and what one says are two different things!
So it was that the art mating ritual developed early
in the century-in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in
The apache dance
J5
New York. As we've just seen, the ritual has two
phases:
1. The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his
stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms,
of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he
doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he
has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable
world uptown.
2. The Consummation, in which culturati from
that very same world, le monde, scout the various
new movements and new artists of bohemia,
select those who seem the most exciting, original,
important, by whatever standards-and shower
them with all the rewards of celebrity.
By the First World War the process was already like
what in the Paris clip joints of the day was known as an
apache dance. The artist was like the female in the act,
stamping her feet, yelling defiance one moment, feigning indifference the next, resisting the advances of her
pursuer with absolute contempt ... more thrashing
about ... more rake-a-cheek fury ... more yelling and
carrying on ... until finally with one last mighty and
marvelously ambiguous shriek-pain! ecstasy!-she
submits ... Paff paff paff paff paff ... How you do it,
my boy! ... and the house lights rise and Everyone, tout
le monde, applauds ...
The artist's payoff in this ritual is obvious enough.
He stands to gain precisely what Freud says are the
goals of the artist: fame, money, and beautiful lovers.
16
The Painted Word
But what about le monde, the culturati, the social members of the act? What's in it for them? Part of their reward is the ancient and semi-sacred status of
Benefactor of the Arts. The arts have always been a
doorway into Society, and in the largest cities today the
arts-the museum boards, arts councils, fund drives,
openings, parties, committee meetings-have completely replaced the churches in this respect. But there
is more!
Today there is a peculiarly modern reward that the
Gustave Dore. The Boho Dance
The apache dance
J7
avant-garde artist can give his benefactor: namely, the
feeling that he, like his mate the artist, is separate from
and aloof from the bourgeoisie, the middle classes ...
the feeling that he may befrom the middle class but he is
no longer in it ... the feeling that he is a fellow soldier,
or at least an aide-de-camp or an honorary cong guerrilla in the vanguard march through the land of the
philistines. This is a peculiarly modern need and a peculiarly modern kind of salvation (from the sin of Too
Much Money) and something quite common among the
well-to-do all over the West, in Rome and Milan as well
as New York. That is why collecting contemporary art,
the leading edge, the latest thing, warm and wet from
the Loft, appeals specifically to those who feel most uneasy about their own commercial wealth ... See? I'm
not like them-those Jaycees, those United Fund chairmen, those Young Presidents, those mindless New York
A.C. goyisheh hog-jowled, stripe-tied goddamn-goodto-see-you-you-old-bastard-you oyster-bar trenchermen ... Avant-garde art, more than any other, takes the
Mammon and the Moloch out of money, puts Levi's,
turtlenecks, muttonchops, and other mantles and laurels of bohemian grace upon it.
That is why collectors today not only seek out the
company of, but also want to hang out amidst, lollygag
around with, and enter into the milieu of ... the artists
they patronize. They want to climb those vertiginous
loft building stairs on Howard Street that go up five
flights without a single turn or bend-straight up! like
something out of a casebook dream-to wind up with
their hearts ricocheting around in their rib cages with
tachycardia from the exertion mainly but also from the
JB
The Painted Word
anticipation that just beyond this door at the top ... in
this loft ... lie the real goods . .. paintings, sculptures
that are indisputably part of the new movement, the
new ecole, the new wave ... something unshrinkable,
chipsy, pure cong, bourgeois-proof.
chapter
The public is not invited
(and never has been)
N
OW WE CAN BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND HOW IT HAP-
pened that the Modernists, Braque & Bros., completed almost all their stylistic innovations before
the First World War, and yet Modern Art seems to belong to the postwar period. It is simply because the
Boho Dance took place before the war and the Consummation took place afterward. This is not what is so
often described as the lag between "the artist's discoveries" and "public acceptance." Public? The public plays
no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited (it gets a printed announcement later).
Le monde, the culturati, are no more a part of "the
public," the mob, the middle classes, than the artists are.
If it were possible to make one of those marvelous sociometric diagrams that sociologists tried to perfect in
I'm still a virgin. (Where's the champagne?)
The public is not invited
2J
the 1950s, in which they tried to trace on a map the
daily routes of key people in a community-a blue line
for Community Leader A here and a red one for
Leader B and a green one for Leader C and a broken sienna one for Bureaucrat Y, and so on-and the lines
started moving around and intersecting here and there
like a hallucinated Sony solid-state panel-if it were
possible to make such a diagram of the art world, we
would see that it is made up of (in addition to the
artists) about 750 culturati in Rome, 500 in Milan, 1,750
in Paris, 1,250 in London, 2,000 in Berlin, Munich, and
Dusseldorf, 3,000 in New York, and perhaps 1,000 scattered about the rest of the known world. That is the art
world, approximately 10,000 souls-a mere hamlet!restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything
in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the
spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any
individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the
trophies distributed long before the public knows what
has happened. The public that buys books in hardcover
and paperback by the millions, the public that buys
records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts,
the public that spends $100 million on a single moviethis public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in
literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites
hang on somewhat desperately in each field. The same
has never been true in art. The public whose glorious
numbers are recorded in the annual reports of the museums, all those students and bus tours and moms and
22
The Painted VVord
The Bettmann A,.chive
Pablo Picasso
dads and random intellectuals ... are merely tourists,
autograph seekers, gawkers, parade watchers, so far as
the game of Success in Art is concerned. The public is
presented with a fait accompli and the aforementioned
printed announcement, usually in the form of a story or
a spread of color pictures in the back pages of Time. An
The public is not invited
23
announcement, as I say. Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newswee~ and The
New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his
worth and make it stick. They can only bring you the
news, tell you which artists the beau hamlet, Cultureburg, has discovered and certified. They can only bring
you the scores.
We can now also begin to see that Modern Art enjoyed all the glories of the Consummation stage after
24
The Painted Word
the First World War not because it was "finally understood" or "finally appreciated" but rather because a few
fashionable people discovered their own uses for it. It
was after the First World War that modern and modernistic came into the language as exciting adjectives
(somewhat like now, as in the Now Generation, during
the 1960s). By 1920, in le monde, to be fashionable was
to be modern, and Modern Art and the new spirit of the
avant-garde were perfectly suited for that vogue.
Picasso is a case in point. Picasso did not begin to become Picasso, in the art world or in the press, until he
was pushing forty and painted the scenery for Diaghilev's Russian ballet in London in 1918. Diaghilev &
Co. were a tremendous succes de scandale in fashionable
London. The wild dervishing of Nijinsky, the lurid
costumes-it was all too deliciously modern for words.
The Modernistic settings by Picasso, Andre Derain,
and (later on) Matisse, were all part of the excitement,
and le monde loved it. "Art," in Osbert Lancaster's
phrase, "came once more to roost among the
duchesses."
Picasso, who had once lived in the legendary unlit attic and painted at night with a brush in one hand and a
candlestick in the other-Picasso now stayed at the
Savoy, had lots of clothes made on Bond Street and
nearby, including a set of tails, went to all the best parties (and parties were never better), was set up with
highly publicized shows of his paintings, and became a
social lion-which he remained, Tales of the Aging
Recluse notwithstanding, until he was in his seventies.
Back in Paris, the new Picasso turned up at the theater with his kid gloves, canes, tall hats, capes, and din-
The public is not invited
25
ner clothes, and the linings gave you a little silk flash
every time he wheeled about in the lobby to chat with
one of his hellish new friends ... Our old pal Braque
shook his head sadly ... At least Derain had had the
decency to confine himself to a blue serge suit when he
was being lionized in London, and he had stuck to the
company of local bohos in his off hours ... But Picasso-Braque was like that incorruptible member of
the Cenacle of the rue des Quatre Vents, Daniel
D' Arthez, watching the decay of Lucien Chardon in
Balzac's Lost Illusions. With a sigh Braque waited for
his old comrade Pablo's imminent collapse as a painter
and a human being ... But the damnedest thing happened instead! Picasso just kept ascending, to El Dorado, to tremendous wealth but to much more than
that, to the sainted status of Picasso, to the point where
by 1950 he was known at every level of opinion, from
Art News to the Daily News, as the painter of the twentieth century. As for Derain and his blue serge suit and
Braque and his scruples-the two old boys, both very
nearly the same age as Picasso, i.e., about seventy, were
remembered in 1950 chiefly as part of the pit crew during Picasso's monumental victory.*
Not to beg the question of differences in talent-but
here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who
knows how to double-track his way from the Boho
Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist
who gets stuck forever in the Boho Dance. This is an
ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly sue• History, kind history, has improved Braque's status considerably since his death
in 1963.
26
The Painted Word
cessful double-tracking requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in both roles. Many
artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that
they are unable to cut loose, let go, with that cathartic
shriek-pain! ectasy! paff paff paff paff paff paff.-and
submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and
his name is Legion, who always comes to the black-tie
openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levi's ... I'm still a virgin! (Where's the champagne?)
Le Tout New York on
a Cubist horse
S
O MODERN ART ENJOYED A TREMENDOUS SOCIAL
boom in Europe in the 1920s. And what about the
United States? A painter, Marsden Hartley, wrote in
1921 that "art in America is like a patent medicine or a
vacuum cleaner. It can hope for no success until ninety
million people know what it is." Bitter stuff! In fact,
however, he couldn't have gotten it more precisely
wrong. Modern Art was a success in the United States
in no time-as soon as a very few people knew what it
was, the 400, as it were, as opposed to the 90 million.
These were New Yorkers of wealth and fashion,
such as the Rockefellers and Goodyears, who saw their
counterparts in London enjoying the chic and excitement of Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and the rest of Le
Moderne and who wanted to import it for themselves.
"Hitch your wagon to a star."-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Le Tout New York on a Cubist horse
29
This they did. Modern Art arrived in the United States
in the 1920s not like a rebel commando force but like
Standard Oil. By 1929 it had been established, institutionalized, in the most overwhelming way: in the form
of the Museum of Modern Art. This cathedral of Culture was not exactly the brain child of visionary bohemians. It was founded in John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s
living room, to be exact, with Goodyears, Blisses, and
Crowninshields in attendance.
Against such a vogue in le monde, conservative critics
in New York were helpless. Their very base no longer
existed. The doyen of the breed, Royal Cortissoz, made
a mighty effort, however. Writing in 1923, at the time
of a national debate over immigration (which led to the
Immigration Act of 1924), he compared the alien invasion of European modernism to the subversive alien
hordes coming in by boat. "Ellis Island art," he called it,
no doubt figuring he had come up with a devastating
label. Well!-as one can imagine!-how everybody
sniggered at poor Mr. Cortissoz over that!
By the mid-1930s, Modern Art was already so chic
that corporations held it aloft like a flag to show that
they were both up-to-date and enlightened, a force in
Culture as well as commerce. The Dole Pineapple
Company sent Georgia O'Keeffe and Isamu Noguchi
to Hawaii to record their impressions, and the Container Corporation of America was commissioning abstract work by Fernand Leger, Henry Moore, and
others. This led to the Container Corporation's longrunning advertising campaign, the Great Ideas of
Western Man series, in which it would run a Great Idea
30
The Painted Word
by a noted savant at the top of the page, one of them
being "'Hitch your wagon to a star'-Ralph Waldo
Emerson." Underneath would be a picture of a Cubist
horse strangling on a banana.
Naturally the chic of Le Moderne put a heavy burden
on theory. Each new movement, each new ism in Modern Art was a declaration by the artists that they had a
new way of seeing which the rest of the world (read: the
bourgeoisie) couldn't comprehend. "We understand!"
said the culturati, thereby separating themselves also
from the herd. But what inna namea Christ were the
artists seeing? This was where theory came in. A hundred years before, Art Theory had merely been something that enriched one's conversation in matters of
Culture. Now it was an absolute necessity. It was no
longer background music. It was an essential hormone
in the mating ritual. All we askfor is a few lines ofexplanation! You say Meret Oppenheim's Fur-Covered Cup,
Saucer and Spoon (the piece de resistance of the Museum
ofModern Art's Surrealism show in December 1936) is
an example of the Surrealist principle of displacement?
You say the texture of one material-fur-has been
imposed upon the forms of others-china and tableware-in order to split the oral, the tactile, and the visual into three critically injured but for the first time
fiercely independent parties in the subconscious? Fine.
To get the word was to understand. The Dadaists professed to be furious over this obscene embrace by the
very people they had been attacking. "Any work of art
that can be understood is the product of a journalist,"
said Tristan Tzara's Dada manifesto. "So what?" came
the reply. ("You dismal little Rumanian.") Even an ex-
Le Tout New York on a Cubist horse
3J
planation of why one couldn't accept something, including Dada, was explanation enough to accept it.
Yet Theory did not come fully into its own, triumphant, transcendent, more important than painting
and sculpture themselves, until after the Second World
War. Theory, this first-class coach on the Freight Train
of History (to use a phrase from the period), was held
back by a little matter that seldom finds its way into the
art histories today, as if what the Freudians call "the
amnesia of childhood" were at work. For more than
ten years, from about 1930 to 1941, the artists themselves, in Europe and America, suspended the Modern
movement ... for the duration, as it were ... They
called it off! They suddenly returned to "literary" realism of the most obvious sort, a genre known as Social
Realism.
Left politics did that for them. Left politicians said,
in effect: You artists claim to be dedicated to an antibourgeois life. Well, the hour has now come to stop
merely posing and to take action, to turn your art into
a weapon. Translation: propaganda paintings. The influence of Left politics was so strong within the art
world during the 1930s that Social Realism became not
a style of the period but the style of the period. Even the
most dedicated Modernists were intimidated. Years
later Barnett Newman wrote that the "shouting dogmatists, Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, and Trotskyite"
created "an intellectual prison that locked one in tight."
I detect considerable amnesia today on that point. All
best forgotten! Artists whose names exist as little more
than footnotes today-William Gropper, Ben Shahn,
Jack Levine-were giants as long as the martial music
32
The Painted Word
of the mimeograph machines rolled on in a thousand
Protest Committee rooms. For any prominent critic of
the time to have written off Ben Shahn as a commercial
illustrator, as Barbara Rose did recently, would have
touched off a brawl. Today no one cares, for Social Realism evaporated with the political atmosphere that
generated it. By 1946 the scene had cleared for the art
of our clay-an art more truly Literary than anything
ever roared against in the wildest angers of the Fauvists
and Cubists.
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
N
ONE OF THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST PAINTINGS
that remain from the palmy days of 1946 to 1960and precious few are still hanging except in museums and the guest bedrooms of Long Island
beachhouses, back there with the iron bedstead whose
joints don't gee, the Russel Wright water pitcher left
over from the set of dishes the newlyweds bought for
their first apartment after the war, and an Emerson radio with tubes and a shortwave band ... none of the
paintings, as I say, not even Jackson Pollock's and
Willem de Kooning's, makes quite as perfect a memorial to that brave and confident little epoch as the Theories. As for the paintings-de gustibus non disputandum
est. But the theories, I insist, were beautiful.
Theories? They were more than theories, they were
When Flat was God . Using the impastometer
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
35
mental constructs. No, more than that even ... veritable edifices behind the eyeballs they were ... castles in
the cortex ... mezuzahs on the pyramids of Betz ...
crystalline ... comparable in their bizarre refinements
to medieval Scholasticism.
We can understand the spellbinding effect these theories had, however, only by keeping in mind what we
have noted so far: (1) the art world is a small town; (2)
part of the small town, le monde, always looks to the
other, bohemia, for the new wave and is primed to believe in it; (3) bohemia is made up of cenacles, schools,
coteries, circles, cliques. Consequently, should one dnade come to dominate bohemia, its views might very
well dominate the entire small town (a.k.a. "the art
world"), all the way from the Chambers Street station
to Eighty-ninth and Fifth.
And that is precisely what happened in New York
after the Second World War in the era of Abstract Expressionism, when New York replaced Paris (as one
was so often reminded) as the county seat of Modernism.
During the Dark Ages-i.e., the 1930s interlude of
Social Realism-small dnacles of Modernists kept the
faith alive down in bohemia, down below Fourteenth
Street. They were like a real underground, for a
change-in hiding this time not from that rather metaphysical menace, the bourgeoisie, but from their own
comrade bohemian drillmasters, the aforementioned
"shouting dogmatists" of the Left. Even Franz Kline,
the abstract painter's abstract painter, was dutifully
cranking out paintings of unemployed Negroes, crippled war veterans, and the ubiquitous workers with the
36
The Painted Word
open blue work shirts and necks wider than their
heads. But there were those who kept Modernism
alive ...
The most influential cenacle centered upon Hans
Hofmann, a German painter in his mid-fifties who
simply ignored the drillmasters and ran his art school
in Greenwich Village as a philosophical outpost for /'art
pour /'art and abstract painting. Another cenacle met in
the studio of a sculptor, Ibram Lassaw; this one included Ad Reinhardt and Josef Albers and eventually
grew into an organization called American Abstract
Artists. The Triple A seemed to be animated mainly by
anger at le monde, and the Whitney Museum and the
Museum of Modern Art particularly, for patronizing
European abstract work (and, if one need edit, not
theirs). Another circle of friends, Adolph Gottlieb,
Mark Rothko, and Milton Avery among them, was
known as "the Ten." Another gathered about John
Graham and included de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, and David Smith. Still another included
Roberto Matta, William Baziotes, and Jackson Pollock,
who was married to a member of the Hofmann cenacle,
Lee Krasner, bringing us full circle.
ALL THESE CIRCLES AND COTERIES CAME TOGETHER
after the war as the cenacle des cenacles, the New York
School, or Tenth Street School, creators of Abstract Expressionism. Most of these people had slogged their
way through the Depression with great difficulty, and
their mood tended toward bohemianism of the High
Seriousness vein.
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flot
37
Two of their main meeting places, the Subjects of the
Artist School and The Club, were on East Eighth
Street, and the other, the Cedar Tavern, was on University Place. But the galleries that showed their work,
such as the Area and the Hilda Carmel, were on Tenth
Street, and that was the name that caught on. Within le
monde, "going down to Tenth Street" was like the Saturday pilgrimage "down to Soho" today. In any event,
Fred W. McDarrah
The Cedar Tavern, scene of the cenac/e des cenacles
and one of Cultureburg's most prestigious boho cafes
of all time, comparable to the Five Spot, the White
Horse, and Max's Kansas City. "Hi, Marko!"
38
The Painted Word
this cenacle was soon so big and so influential that the
regular Friday night meetings at The Club became like
town meetings for the entire New York art scene, attracting dealers, collectors, uptown curators like Alfred
Barr, critics, and just about any other culturati who
could wangle their way in.
The great theorists to come out of this cenacle des cenacles were Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Both had been involved in the Lower Manhattan
Left literary politics of the 1930s, then became more
and more purely theorists, critics, aestheticians in the
1940s. More to the point, both had been friends of various abstract artists even during the Freeze. Greenberg
had been a regular in the Hofmann cenacle-and it was
essentially Hofmann's ideas and Hofmann's emphasis
on purity purity purity that were about to sweep Cultureburg, via Greenberg. One secret of Greenberg's and
Rosenberg's astounding success, then, was that they
were not like uptown critics-they were not mere critics: they spoke as the voice of bohemia ... and naturally
le monde listened.
To describe this, the well-placed platform they spoke
from, is not to downgrade the two men's peculiar genius. Greenberg, in particular, radiated a sense of absolute authority. He was not a very prepossessing
individual at first glance. He spoke in fits and starts one
minute and drawls the next. But somehow one couldn't
help but pay attention. Likewise his prose style: he
would veer from the most skull-crushing Gottingen
Scholar tautologies, "essences" and "purities" and "opticalities" and "formal factors" and "logics of readjustment" and God knows what else ... to cries of despair
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
39
and outrage such as would have embarrassed Shelley.
In a famous essay in Horizon in 1947 he said the entire
future of art in America was in the hands of fifty brave
but anonymous and beleagured artists "south of 34th
Street" who were about to be wiped out at any moment.
By whom-by what? Why, by the "dull horror" of
American life. "Their isolation is inconceivably crushing, unbroken, damning," said Greenberg. "That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this
situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do
against a hundred and forty million?"
Fifty against 140 million! Beautiful; he had outHartleyed Marsden Hartley; Hartley's scouting report
on the enemy back in 1921 listed only 90 million. It was
all sheer rhetoric, of course, the antibourgeois singalong of bohemia, standard since the 1840s, as natural
as breathing by now and quite marvelously devoid of
any rational content-and yet Greenberg pulled it off
with-well, not just with authority but with moral authority. When Greenberg spoke, it was as if not merely
the future of Art were at stake but the very quality, the
very possibility, of civilization in America. His fury
seemed to come out of an implacable insistence on purity. He saw Modernism as heading toward a certain inevitable conclusion, through its own internal logic, just
as Marxists saw Western society as heading irrevocably
toward the dictatorship of the proletariat and an ensuing nirvana. In Greenberg's eyes, the Freight Train of
Art History had a specific destination. He called for
"self-criticism" and "self-definition"-" self-definition
with a vengeance," he said. It was time to clear the
tracks at last of all the remaining rubble of the pre-
40
The Painted Word
Modern way of painting. And just what was this destination? On this point Greenberg couldn't have been
clearer: Flatness.
The general theory went as follows: as the Cubists
and other early Modernists had correctly realized, a
painting was not a window through which one could
peer into the distance. The three-dimensional effects
were sheer illusion (et ergo ersatz). A painting was a
flat surface with paint on it. Earlier abstract artists had
understood the importance of flatness in the simple
sense of painting in two dimensions, but they hadn't
known how to go beyond that. They still used paint in
such a way that it divided neatly into lines, forms, contours, and colors, just as it had in pre-Modern days.
What was needed was purity-a style in which lines,
forms, contours, colors all became unified on the flat
surface.
This business of flatness became quite an issue; an
© 1973 Arnold Newman
Clement Greenberg
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
41
obsession, one might say. The question of what an artist
could or could not do without violating the principle of
Flatness-"the integrity of the picture plane," as it became known-inspired such subtle distinctions, such
exquisitely miniaturized hypotheses, such stereotactic
microelectrode needle-implant hostilities, such brilliant
if ever-decreasing tighter-turning spirals of logic . ..
that it compares admirably with the most famous of all
questions that remain from the debates of the Scholastics: "How many angels can dance on the head of a
. .? "
pm
MOST OF THE THEORY UP TO 1950 WAS GREENBERGIAN
in origin. Enter Rosenberg. Rosenberg came up with a
higher synthesis, a theory that combined Greenberg's
formal purity with something that had been lacking in
abstract art from the early Synthetic Cubist days and
ever since: namely, the emotional wallop of the old realistic pre-Modern pictures. This was a question that
Harold Rosenberg
42
The Painted Word
had troubled Picasso throughout the 1930s. Any return
to realism was out, of course, but Rosenberg had a solution: "Action Painting," which became the single
most famous phrase of the period (a fact that did not
please Greenberg).
"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to
one American painter after another as an arena in
which to act," said Rosenberg. "What was to go on the
canvas was not a picture but an event." The vision that
Rosenberg inspired caught the public imagination for a
time (the actual public!) as well as that of more painters,
professional and amateur, than one is likely to want to
recall. It was of Action Painter ... a Promethean artist
gorged with emotion and overloaded with paint, hurling himself and his brushes at the canvas as if in handto-hand combat with Fate. There! . .. there! . .. there in
those furious swipes of the brush on canvas, in those
splatters of unchained id, one could see the artist's emotion itself-still alive!-in the finished product. (And
see? All the picture-plane integrity a reasonable man
could ask for, and lines that are forms and forms that
are colors and colors that are both.)
It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply
turn up with them one day like tablets brought down
from atop Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H.
Friedman once called the two men). As toutle monde
understood, they were not only theories but ... hot
news, straight from the studios, from the scene. Rosenberg's famous Action Painting piece in Art News did
not mention a single new artist by name, but tout le
monde knew that when he spoke of "one American
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
43
painter after another" taking up the style, he was really
talking about one American painter: his friend de
Kooning ... or perhaps de Kooning and his cenacle.
Greenberg's main man, as Everybody knew, was his
friend Pollock.
Greenberg didn't discover Pollock or even create his
reputation, as was said so often later on. Damnable Uptown did that. Pick me! Peggy Guggenheim picked Pollock. He was a nameless down-and-out boho Cubist.
She was the niece of Solomon (Guggenheim Museum)
Guggenheim and the center of the most chic Uptown
art circle 1n New York in the 1940s, a circle featuring
famous Modern artists from Europe (including her
husband, Max Ernst) who were fleeing the war, Uptown intellectuals such as Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney of the Museum of Modern Art, and young
boho proteges such as two members of Pollock's cenacle, Baziotes and Robert Motherwell. In a single year,
1943, Peggy Guggenheim met Pollock through
Baziotes and Motherwell, gave him a monthly stipend,
got him moving in the direction of Surrealist "automatic writing" (she loved Surrealism), set him up on
Fifty-seventh Street-Uptown Street of Dreams!with his first show-in the most chic Modernist salon
in the history of New York, her own Art of This Century Gallery, with its marvelous Surrealist Room,
where the pictures were mounted on baseball bats-got
Sweeney to write the catalogue introduction, in prose
that ranged from merely rosy to deep purple dreamsand Barr inducted one of the paintings, The She Wolf,
into the Museum of Modern Art's Permanent Collection-and Motherwell wrote a rave for Partisan Re-
Hans Namuth
De Kooning in his studio in mid-Action:
the bull-or the matador-as you like it-pulls back
and takes a few snorts of reflection before the next
collision with Fate
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
45
view-and Greenberg wrote a super-rave for The Nation ... and, well, Greenberg was rather late getting
into the loop, if anything. The Consummation was
complete and Pollock was a Success before the last
painting was hung and the doors were opened and the
first Manhattan was poured (remember Manhattans?)
on opening night. To that extent Greenberg was just an
ordinary reporter bringing you the latest news.
But Greenberg did something more than discover
Pollock or establish him. He used Pollock's certified
success to put over Flatness as the theory-the theoretical breakthrough of Einstein-scale authority-of the
entire new wave of the Tenth Street cenacle des cenacles.
"Pollock's strength," he would say, "lies in the emphatic surfaces of his pictures, which it is his concern to
maintain and intensify in all that thick, fuliginous flatness which began-but only began-to be the strong
point of late Cubism." And all through bohemia the
melody played ... That thic~ fuliginous flatness got me
in its spell . .. "It is the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface," Greenberg
would say, "that produces the strength of his art" ...
That constructed, re-created flatness that you weave so
well . .. "his concentration on surface texture and tactile qualities" ... Those famous paint-flings on that picture plane ...
AH, THE MUSIC WAS PLAYING! AND CLEMENT GREEN-
berg was the composer! Other artists were picking up
on his theories and Rosenberg's, sometimes by reading
them in the journals--Partis-an Review, The Nation,
46
The Painted Word
Horizon-but more often in conversation. With The
Club going down on Eighth Street the artists of bohemia were now meeting all the time, every day, and
talking up a storm. They outtalked any ten canasta
clubs from Oceanside and Cedarhurst.
Greenberg was no slouch at conversation himself, despite his jerky windups and his not very elegant deliveries. Somehow the rough edges went perfectly with
the moral conviction that seemed to radiate from his
eyeballs. A forty-one-year-old Washington, D.C., artist
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
47
Collection, The Museum of Modem Art, N ew York
Jackson Pollock's The She Wolf (1943}. the painting
the Museum of Modern Art bought as its part in
Pollock ' s Consummation . The style is halfway between
Pollock's early Picasso-Cubist style and the completely
abstract "drip" style for which Pollock is best known .
That thick , fuliginous flatness got me in its spell .. .
named Morris Louis came to New York in 1953 to try
to get a line on what was going on in this new wave,
and he had some long talks with Greenberg, and the
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Morris Louis, Third Element, 1962.
No pointer ever took the Word more literally; with the
possible exception of Fronk Stella
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
49
whole experience changed his life. He went back to
Washington and began thinking. Flatness, the man had
said ... (You bet he had) ... The spark flew, and Louis
saw the future with great clarity. The very use of thick
oil paint itself had been a crime against flatness, a violation of the integrity of the picture plane, all these
years ... But of course! Even in the hands of Picasso,
ordinary paint was likely to build up as much as a millimeter or two above mean canvas level! And as for the
new Picasso-i.e., Pollock-my God, get out a ruler!
So Louis used unprimed canvas and thinned out his
paint until it soaked right into the canvas when he
brushed it on. He could put a painting on the floor and
lie on top of the canvas and cock his eye sideways like a
robin and look along the surface of the canvas-and he
had done it! Nothing existed above or below the picture plane, except for a few ultramicroscopic wisps of
cotton fray, and what reasonable person could count
that against him ... No, everything now existed precisely in the picture plane and nowhere else. The paint
was the picture plane, and the picture plane was the
paint. Did I hear the word.flat?-well, try to out-flat
this, you young Gotham rascals! Thus was born an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism known as the Washington School. A man from Mars or Chester, Pa.,
incidentally, would have looked at a Morris Louis
painting and seen rows of rather watery-looking
stripes.
But the Washington School or the Tenth Street
School was no place for creatures from out of state unless they'd had their coats pulled, unless they'd been
briefed on the theories. In no time these theories of flat-
50
The Painted Word
ness, of abstractness, of pure form and pure color, of expressive brushwork ("action") seemed no longer mere
theories but axioms, part of the given, as basic as the
Four Humors had once seemed in any consideration of
human health. Not to know about these things was not
to have the Word.
The Word-but exactly. A curious change was taking
place at the very core of the business of being a painter.
Early Modernism had been a reaction to nineteenthcentury realism, an abstraction of it, a diagram of it, to
borrow John Berger's phrase, just as a blueprint is a diagram of a house. But this Abstract Expressionism of the
Tenth Street School was a reaction to earlier Modernism
itself, to Cubism chiefly. It was an abstraction of an abstraction, a blueprint of the blueprint, a diagram of the
diagram-and a diagram of a diagram is metaphysics.
Anyone who tries making a diagram of a diagram will
see why. Metaphysics can be dazzling!-as dazzling as
the Scholastics and their wing commands of Angels and
Departed Souls. But somehow the ethereal little dears
are inapprehensible without words. In short, the new
order of things in the art world was: first you get the
Word, and then you can see.
The artists themselves didn't seem to have the
faintest notion of how primary Theory was becoming.
I wonder if the theorists themselves did. All of them,
artists and theorists, were talking as if their conscious
aim was to create a totally immediate art, lucid,
stripped of all the dreadful baggage of history, an art
fully revealed, honest, as honest as the flat-out integral
picture plane. "Aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds," said Barnett Newman in a much-
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
5l
repeated mot. And yet Newman himself happened to
be one of the most incessant theoreticians on Eighth
Street, and his work showed it. He spent the last
twenty-two years of his life studying the problems (if
any) of dealing with big areas of color divided by
stripes ... on a flat picture plane. Nobody was immune
to theory any longer. Pollock would say things like
"Cezanne didn't create theories. They're after the fact."
He was only whistling "Dixie." The fact was that theories-Greenberg's-about Pollock-were beginning to
affect Pollock. Greenberg hadn't created Pollock's rep-
Hans Namuth
Barnett Newman
Hans Namuth
Jackson Pollock
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
53
utation, but he was its curator, custodian, brass polisher,
and repairman, and he was terrific at it. With each new
article Greenberg edged Pollock's status a little higher,
from "among the strongest" American abstract artists
ever to "the strongest painter of his generation" in
America to "the most powerful painter in contemporary America" to a neck-and-neck competition with
John Marin (John Marin!) for the title of "the greatest
American painter of the twentieth century." To the few
remaining dissidents, Uptown or Downtown, who still
pulled long faces and said Pollock's work looked terribly "muddy" or "chaotic" or simply "ugly," Greenberg
had a marvelous comeback: but of course!-"all profoundly original art looks ugly at first." Well ... yes!
That's . .. right! In an age of avant-gardism, when practically everybody in Cultureburg could remember some
new ism which he "hadn't gotten" at first, this Greenberg dictum seemed to be a pivotal insight of Modernism, the golden aperfu. To collectors, curators, and
even some dealers, new work that looked genuinely
ugly ... began to take on a strange new glow ...
In any event, if Greenberg was right about Pollock's
status in the world of art-and Pollock wasn't arguing-then he must also be right about the theories. So
Pollock started pushing his work in the direction the
theories went. Onward! Flatter! More fuliginous!
More "over-all evenness"! But fewer gaping holes!
(Greenberg thought Pollock sometimes left "gaping
holes" in the otherwise "integrated plane.") Greenberg
took to going by Pollock's studio and giving on-thespot critiques.
Soon Pollock was having a generally hard time fig-
54
The Painted Word
uring out where the boundary was between Himselfold Jack-and his Reputation or whether there was
any. Pollock was the classic case of the artist hopelessly
stuck between the Boho Dance and the Consummation. Pollock had internalized the usual antibourgeois
bohemian values in huge gulps during the days of the
Depression, when he was a boho on the dole and doing
odd jobs such as hand-painting neckties (during that
short-lived men's fashion). The Consummation came
so fast-in that one year, 1943-Pollock never could
manage the double-tracking. He got forever stuck
halfway. Here was the archetypical Pollock gesture:
one night he arrives drunk at Peggy Guggenheim's
house during a party for a lot of swell people. So he
takes off his clothes in another room and comes walking into the living room stark naked and urinates in the
fireplace. On the other hand, neither that night nor
thereafter did he give up coming to Peggy Guggenheim's house, where all those swell people were. He
would insist on going to the old Stork Club or to 21
without a necktie to prove he could get in anyway
thanks to "my reputation"-and if he did, he would
make sure he got drunk enough and rude enough to
get thrown out. They had to accept him Uptown, but
he couldn't stand liking it.
Despite his huge reputation, his work did not sell
well, and he barely scraped by financially-which satisfied his boho soul on the one hand but also made him
scream (stuck, as he was, in the doorway): If I'm so terrific, why ain't I rich? And this gets down to the problems that collectors were beginning to have with
Abstract Expressionism and the abstract styles that fol-
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
55
lowed, such as the Washington School. Most of early
Modernism, and particularly Cubism, was only partly
abstract. The creatures in Matisse's ]oie de Vivre, which
seemed so outrageously abstract in 1905, may not have
been nice concupiscent little lamb chops such as were
available in Max Klinger's The Judgment of Paris, but
they were nude women all the same. For many collectors it was enough to know the general theory and the
fact that here were nudes done in "the new [Fauvist,
Cubist, Expressionist, Surrealist, or whatever] way."
But with Abstract Expressionism and what came after
it, they had to have ... the Word. There were no two
ways about it. There was no use whatsoever in looking
at a picture without knowing about Flatness and associated theorems.
How manfully they tried! How they squinted and
put their fingers under their eyelids in order to focus
more sharply (as Greenberg was said to do) ... how
they tried to internalize the theories to the point where
they could feel a tingle or two at the very moment they
looked at an abstract painting ... without first having
to give the script a little run-through in their minds.
And some succeeded. But all tried! I stress that in light
of the terrible charges some of the Abstractionists and
their theorists are making today against the collectors ... calling them philistines and nouveaux-riches, status strivers who only pretended to like abstract art, even
during the heyday of the 1950s. Which is to say: You
were nothing but fat middle-class fakes all along! You
never had a true antibourgeois bone in your bodies!
56
The Painted Word
AH, INGRATITUDE, INGRATITUDE ••• ARS LONGA MEMORIA
brevis ... The truth was that the collectors wanted
nothing more than to believe wholeheartedly, to march
with the Abstract Expressionists as aides-de-cong
through the land of the philistines. They believed, along
with the artists, that Abstract Expressionism was the
final form, that painting had at last gone extraatmospheric, into outer space, into a universe of pure
forms and pure colors. Even Cultureburg's intellectual
fringe, the journalists of the popular press, reported the
news in good faith, without a snigger. In 1949 Life
magazine gave Pollock a three-page spread, two of
them in color, headed: "JACKsoN POLLOCK. Is he the
greatest living painter in the United States?" The
whole piece was clearly derived from the say-so of
Greenberg, whom Life identified as "a formidably
high-brow New York critic." Life, Time, Newsweek
continued to follow Abstract Expressionism, in color,
with the occasional 22-caliber punnery about "Jack the
Dripper" (Pollock) who says little and "stands on his
painting," but also with the clear message that this was
what was important in contemporary art.
In fact, the press was so attentive that Harold Rosenberg, as well as Pollock, wondered why so little Abstract Expressionism was being bought. "Considering
the degree to which it is publicized and feted," Rosenberg said, "vanguard painting is hardly bought at all."
Here Rosenberg was merely betraying the art world's
blindness toward its own strategies. He seemed to believe that there was an art public in the same sense that
there was a reading public and that, consequently, there
should be some sort of public demand for the latest art
Greenberg, Rosenberg & Flat
57
objects. He was doing the usual, in other words. First
you do everything possible to make sure your world is
antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it
mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the
insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of
subtlety and intellect-and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-1-mean? outrage: look, they don't even buy our products! (Usually
referred to as "quality art.") The art world had been
successfully restricted to about 10,000 souls worldwide,
the beaux mondes of a few metropolises. Of these, perhaps 2,000 were collectors, and probably no more than
300-worldwide-bought current work (this year's,
last year's, the year-before's) with any regularity; of
these, perhaps 90 lived in the United States.
There were brave and patriotic collectors who created a little flurry of activity on the Abstract Expressionist market in the late 1950s, but in general this type
of painting was depreciating faster than a Pontiac Bonneville once it left the showroom. The resale market
was a shambles. Without the museums to step in here
and there, to buy in the name of history, Abstract Expressionism was becoming a real beached whale commercially. The deep-down mutter-to-myself truth was
that the collectors, despite their fervent desire to be virtuous, had never been able to build up any gusto for
Abstract Expressionism. Somehow that six-flight walk
up the spiral staircase of Theory took the wind out of
you.
I once heard Robert Scull say, "Abstract Expressionism was a little club down on Tenth Street. There were
never more than 100 people in on it." Scull was a col-
58
The Painted Word
lector from a later, enemy camp, Pop Art, and he may
have set the figure too low, but I suspect that he was, at
the core, correct. As was the case with Swedenborgianism and Rosicrucianism, Abstract Expressionism's
makers and theorists and its truly committed audience
seem to have been one and the same. Who else was
there, really, but the old cenacles down on Eighth
Street ... unless you also count the interior decorators
who did truly love to use Abstract Expressionist paintings with those large flat areas (0 integral planes!) of
bright color to set off the stark white apartments that
were so fashionable at the time.
But to say that Abstract Expressionism was a baby
that only its parents could love is not to downgrade its
theorists in the slightest. Quite the opposite. For a good
fifteen years, with nothing going for them except brain
power and stupendous rectitude and the peculiar
makeup of the art world, they projected this style, this
unloved brat of theirs, until it filled up the screen of art
history.
c h a,.cP t e r
Hello, Steinberg
(Goodbye, Greenberg)
(You, too, Rosenberg)
(Joy returns to Cultureburg)
W
E MAY STATE IT AS A PRINCIPLE AT THIS POINT
that collectors of contemporary art do not want to
buy highly abstract art unless it's the only game in
town. They will always prefer realistic art instead-as
long as someone in authority assures them that it is (a)
new, and (b) not realistic. To understand this contradiction is to understand what happened next: Pop Art.
One day-in 1963, it must have been-I ran into a
magazine editor, a culturatus of sorts, and I happened
to bring up the subject of Abstract Expressionism,
whereupon he told me with a tone that indicated I must
be the only person in town who hadn't gotten the inside
news: "Listen, Abstract Expressionism is dead. It's been
finished off by a professor at Hunter College, a guy
named Leo Steinberg."
Andy Warhol. Nothing is more bourgeois than to be
afraid to look bourgeois
Hello, Steinberg
61
I don't know that Steinberg finished off Abstract Expressionism. It only needed a little push. But Steinberg
was certainly one of the authorities who made it okay to
like Pop Art.
The Pop Art era is usually dated from the first oneman show of Jasper Johns at the Leo Castelli Gallery,
January 20 to February 8, 1958, with paintings of American flags, letters of the alphabet, rows of numbers, and
archery targets. Johns and his friend Robert Rauschenberg were the major figures in a cenacle of younger
artists who in the 1950s began to react against the bynow sainted Abstract Expressionists. Young artists had
started pouring into Lower Manhattan and heading,
naturally, for legendary spots like the Cedar Tavern.
They liked to pop into the Cedar with their toggle coats
and corduroys and other proper boho gear on, like
Mark Feldstein
leo Steinberg
62
The Painted Word
Hans Namuth
Hans Namuth
Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the two early
imps of Pop Art
young recruits ready for the battle against the blind
public, and they'd say, "Hi, Bill!" (de Kooning), "Hi,
Franz!" (Kline), "Whaddaya say, Marko!" (Rothko).
But the old boys didn't exactly feel like being buddies
and sharing the glow with these hideously chummy
young nobodies. All right ... So Johns and Rauschenberg started zapping the old bastards in their weakest
spot: their dreadful solemnity and High Seriousness.
The Tenth Street cenacle des cenacles was full of artists
who were so spiritual that they never even got as far as
Pollock had in double-tracking out of the Boho Dance
and into the Consummation. They remained psychologically (and, by and by, resentfully) trapped in bohemia. Rothko refused to participate in a Whitney
Museum annual show in order to safeguard "the life my
pictures will lead in the world," and refused (or claimed
Hello, Steinberg
63
to refuse) to set foot in any Uptown art gallery unless
some friend of his was having an opening. So Rauschenberg took to giving interviews in the art magazines in
which he said that being an artist was no different, spiritually, from being a cargo hum per or a file clerk or anything else. He exhibited oeuvres such as three Coca-Cola
bottles, the actual bottles, surmounted by a pair of eagle
wings. But all that was too easy to write off as mere
Dada. Johns's 1958 show was something else again. It
wasn't a coarse gesture; it was mighty cool ... and
something an ambitious young critic could fly with.
So Leo Steinberg, along with William Rubin, another theorist (and collector), depicted Johns's work as
a newer, higher synthesis. The central arguing point?
But of course-our old friend Flatness.
The new theory went as follows. Johns had chosen
real subjects such as flags and numbers and letters and
targets that were flat by their very nature. They were
born to be flat, you might say. Thereby Johns was
achieving an amazing thing. He was bringing real subjects into Modern painting but in a way that neither violated the law of Flatness nor introduced "literary"
content. On the contrary: he was converting pieces of
everyday communication-flags and numbers-into
art objects ... and thereby de-literalizing them! Were
they content or were they form? They were neither!
They were a higher synthesis. "An amazing result,"
said Steinberg.
Then Steinberg noticed something else. Johns had
covered his flat signs in short, choppy Cezanne-like
brushstrokes. Somehow this made them look flatter
than ever ... In fact, his flatness exposed once and for
64
The Painted Word
Collection Mrs. Leo Castelli. Courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery
Jasper Johns's Flag, 1958 . Born to be flat
all the pseudo-flatness of Abstract Expressionists like de
Kooning and Pollock. The jig was up! Steinberg was
now ready to give the coup de grace to Clement Greenberg.
Greenberg had always argued that the Old Masters,
the classic 3-D realists, had created "an illusion of space
into which one could imagine oneself walking,"
whereas-to the everlasting glory of Modernism-you
couldn't walk into a Modernist painting and least of all
into an Abstract Expressionist painting. (Too honest,
too flat for any such ersatz experience.) Just a minute,
said Steinberg. That's all well and good, but you're
talking about a "pre-industrial standard of locomotion," i.e., walking. Perhaps you can't walk into an Abstract Expressionist painting-but you can fly through.
Right! You could take a spaceship! Just look at a de
Hello, Steinberg
65
Kooning or a Rothko or a Franz Kline. Look at that
"airy" quality, those "areas floating in space," those
cloud formations, all that "illusionistic space" with its
evocations of intergalactic travel. Why, you could sail
through a de Kooning in a Mercury capsule or a Soyuz
any day in the week! All along, the Abstract Expressionists had been dealing in "open atmospheric effects."
It was aerial "double dealing," and it did "clearly deny
and dissemble the picture's material surface"-and nobody had ever blown the whistle on them!
Well, it was all now blown for Abstract Expressionism. Steinberg, with an assist from Rubin and from another theoretician, Lawrence Alloway, removed the
cataracts from everybody's eyes overnight. Steinberg
put across many of his ideas in a series of lectures at the
Museum ofModern Art in 1960. The auditorium seats
only 480, but with Cultureburg being such a small
town-and the Museum looming so large in it-that
platform was just right: his ideas spread as fast as
Greenberg's had fifteen years before. Steinberg's manner was perfect for the new era. Where Greenberg was
a theologian always on the edge of outrage and hostility, like Jonathan Edwards or Savonarola, Steinberg
was cool, even a bit ironic. He was the young scholar,
the historian; serious but urbane.
As soon as he realized what Johns's work meant, said
Steinberg, "the pictures of de Kooning and Kline, it
seemed to me, were suddenly tossed into one pot with
Rembrandt and Giotto. All alike suddenly became
painters of illusion." Later on, Steinberg changed that
to "Watteau and Giotto"; perhaps for the crazy trans-
66
The Painted Word
lingual rhyme, which, I must say, I like ... or perhaps
because being tossed into the same pot with Rembrandt, even by Leo Steinberg, was a fate that any
artist, de Kooning included, might not mind terribly.
This may have been the end of Abstract Expressionism, but for Art Theory it was a fine, a rare, a beautiful,
an artistic triumph. With that soaring aerial aperfu of
Leo Steinberg's, Art Theory reached a heavenly plane,
right up there with Paracelsus, Meister Eckhart, Christian Rosenkreutz, Duns Scotus, and the Scholastics ...
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
That was once a question of infinite subtlety. Ah, yes!
But consider: "Can a spaceship penetrate a de Koon. .?"
mg
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Franz Kline's Painting Number Two, 1954.
Can a spaceship penetrate a Kline?
Hello, Steinberg
67
JASPER JOHNS ' S SHOW WAS THE PERFECT EXHIBITION
for the new age of Theory. He had intentionally devised it as an art lecture in pictures. It was like one of
those puzzles in the 59-cent playbooks on sale in the
wire racks in the supermarkets, in which you're invited
to write down the sentences that the pictures create:
But wasn't there something just the least bit incestuous about this tendency of contemporary art to use previous styles of art as its point of reference? Early
Modernism was a comment on academic realism, and
Abstract Expressionism was a comment on early Modernism, and now Pop Art was a comment on Abstract
Expressionism-wasn't there something slightly narrow, clubby, ingrown about it? Not at all, said Steinberg, whereupon he formulated one of the great axioms
of the period: "Whatever else it may be, all great art is
about art." Steinberg's evidence for this theory was far
more subtle than convincing. Sophistry, I believe, is the
word. He would cite Renaissance paintings with figures in the frames pointing at the main picture. (See?
They're commenting on art.) But never mind ... Steinberg's axiom was another one that inspired the profound "That's . .. right!" reaction throughout the art
scene. Steinberg's own qualifier was dropped, and the
68
The Painted Word
mot became simply: "All great art is about art." That
was like DDT for a lot of doubts that might otherwise
have beset true believers over the next few years.
Meanwhile, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg made a grave tactical error. They simply denounced Pop Art. That was a gigantic blunder.
Greenberg, above all, as the man who came up with the
peerless Modern line, "All profoundly original work
looks ugly at first," should have realized that in an age
of avant-gardism no critic can stop a new style by meeting it head-on. To be against what is new is not to be
modern. Not to be modern is to write yourself out of
the scene. Not to be in the scene is to be nowhere. No,
in an age of avant-gardism the only possible strategy to
counter a new style which you detest is to leapfrog it.
You abandon your old position and your old artists,
leaping over the new style, land beyond it, point back to
it, and say: "Oh, that's nothing. I've found something
newer and better ... way out here." This would dawn
on Greenberg later.
Steinberg could attack Abstract Expressionism precisely because he was saying, "I've found something
newer and better." But one will note that at no time
does he attack the premises of Late-Twentieth-Century
Art Theory as developed by Greenberg. He accepts
every fundamental Greenberg has put forth. Realism
and three-dimensional illusion are still forbidden. Flatness is still God. Steinberg simply adds: "I've found a
new world that's flatter."
So that was how Pop Art came in: a new order, but
the same Mother Church.
Hello, Steinberg
69
Within a few years the most famous images of Pop
Art were Roy Lichtenstein's blowups of panels from
war comics and love comics and Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans and Brillo boxes. But wasn't that realism? Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. Alloway, the
Englishman who coined the term Pop Art, provided
the rationale: the comics, labels, and trademarks that
the Pop artists liked were not representations of external reality. They were commonplace "sign systems" of
American culture. By enlarging them and putting them
on canvas, the artists were converting them from messages into something that was neither message nor external image. "Pop Art is neither abstract nor realistic,"
said Alloway, "though it has contacts in both directions.
The core of Pop Art is at neither frontier; it is, essentially, an art about signs and sign systems." That may
have been a bit hard to follow, but the stamp of approval came through clearly to one and all: "It's okay!
You are hereby licensed to go ahead and like these pictures. We've drained all the realism out."
POP ART ABSOLUTELY REJUVENATED THE NEW YORK
art scene. It did for the galleries, the collectors, the
gallery-goers, the art-minded press, and the artists' incomes about what the Beatles did for the music business at about the same time. It was the thaw! It was
spring again! The press embraced Pop Art with priapic
delight. That goddamned Abstract Expressionism had
been so solemn, so grim ... "Shards of interpenetrated
sensibility make their way, tentatively, through a notal-
70
The Painted Word
ways compromisable field of cobalt blue-" How could
you write about the freaking stuff? Pop Art you could
have fun with.
Avant-gardism, money, status, Le Chic, and even the
1960s idea of sexiness-it all buzzed around Pop Art.
The place, without any question, was Leo Castelli's
gallery at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Castelli had
Johns, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg,
James Rosenquist, most of the heavies. It was there that
the Culture buds now hung out, beautiful little girls,
with their hips cocked and the seams of their Jax slax
cleaving them into hemispheres while they shot Culture pouts through their Little Egypt eyes.
God knows, the Pop artists themselves entered
into the spirit of the thing. Whereas the Abstract
Expressionists had so many disastrous problems
double-tracking from the Boho Dance to the Consummation-whereas Pollock, Newman, Rothko, the
whole push, in fact, had their own early antibourgeois
boho ideals hovering over them forevermore like the
most vengeful and vigilant superego in the history of
psychology-the Pop artists double-tracked with about
as much moral agony as a tape recorder. They came
up with a new higher synthesis of personal conduct: to
wallow in the luxuries of le monde, to junk it through
with absolute abandon, was simply part of the new bohemia. Nothing to it! The artists used to hang around
the apartment of Robert Scull, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, like children who
don't know that you're supposed to go home at suppertime. They'd be there all afternoon, and Bob-Bob
Scull-or Spike-Bob's wife, Ethel-he called her
Hello, Steinberg
71
Spike-would go around commenting on how it was
getting dark and-oh, well, how about switching on a
few lights, boys-and so they'd just turn on a few
lights-and by and by it would be time to eat-and the
artists would still be there, like little boys, wide-eyed
and ready for goodies-and Spike would say, Well,
we're going to eat now-and instead of saying, Uh, I
guess I have to go home now, they'd say: Swell! Fine!
Let's eat! (Where you taking us?) The only problem
they had was that many of them were poor and plebeian in origin and had grown up in bohemia, and they
didn't know even the rudimentary manners of life in le
monde, but that didn't stop them for long. At first,
Andy Warhol, for example, would go out to dinner and
wouldn't know one end of that long lineup of silverware on the table from the other, and so he would sit
there, at some five- or six-course dinner at the Burdens'
or wherever, without touching a morsel, not the creme
senegalaise nor the lobster cardinal nor the veal Valdostana nor the salad Grant Street nor the fresh pear
halves Harry & David-until finally the lady seated to
his left would say, "But, Mr. Warhol, you haven't
touched a thing!"-whereupon Andy would say, "Oh,
I only eat candy." Warhol learned fast, however, and he
soon knew how to take whatever he wanted. The bohemian, by definition, was one who did things the
bourgeois didn't dare do. True enough, said Warhol,
and he added an inspired refinement: nothing is more
bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois. True to
his theory, he now goes about in button-down shirts,
striped ties, and ill-cut tweed jackets, like a 1952 Holy
Cross pre-med student. Warhol's ultimate liberation of
72
The Painted Word
the old puritanical Tenth Street boho ego, however,
came the day he put an ad in The Village Voice saying
that he would endorse anything, anything at all, for
money ... and listing his telephone number.
Double-tracking on all sides! Double-tracking at
once naive and infinitely subtle! Underneath the very
popularity of Pop Art itself, as many people knew, and
nobody said, was a deliciously simple piece of doubletracking. Steinberg, Rubin, and Alloway had declared
Pop Art kosher and quite okay to consume, because it
was all "sign systems," not realism. But everyone else,
from the collectors to the Culture buds, was cheating!
They were like the Mennonite who, forbidden by religious law to have a TV set in his home, props it up on
the fence post outside and watches through an open
window. In the middle of January he sits in his living
room huddled in an overcoat and a blanket, with the
window open, because Mannix is out on the fence. In
short ... the culturati were secretly enjoying the realism !-plain old bourgeois mass-culture high-school
goober-squeezing whitehead-hunting can-1-pop-it-foryou-Billy realism! They looked at a Roy Lichtenstein
blowup of a love-comic panel showing a young blood
couple with their lips parted in the moment before a
profound, tongue-probing, post-teen, American soul
kiss, plus the legend "wE ROSE UP SLOWLY ... AS IF WE
DIDN 'T BELONG TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD ANY LONGER ...
LIKE SWIMMERS IN A SHADOWY DREAM ... WHO DIDN 1T
NEED TO BREATHE ... " and-the hell with the sign systems-they just loved the dopey campy picture of these
two vapid blond sex buds having their love-comic romance bigger than life, six feet by eight feet, in fact, up
Hello, Steinberg
73
WE
WE
IF
THE
ANY
... LIKE
-IN A
SHADOWY
...
...
Private collection, Germany. Courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery
Roy Lichtenstein, "We Rose Up Slowly . .. " 1964.
Not realism . .. sign systems
on the walls in an art gallery. Dopey ... campy .. . Pop
Art was packed with literary associations, quite in addition to the love scene or whatever on the canvas. It
was, from beginning to end, an ironic, a camp, a
literary-intellectual assertion of the banality, emptiness,
silliness, vulgarity, et cetera of American culture, and if
the artists said, as Warhol usually did, "But that's what
I like about it"-that only made the irony more profound, more cool.
Collectors and other culturati also liked this side of
Pop Art immensely, because it was so familiar, so cozily
antibourgeois, because once again it made them honorary congs walking along with the vanguard artists
through the land of the philistines. Steinberg is the only
theorist I know of, with the possible exception of
74
The Painted Word
Bernard Berenson, who ever went to the trouble of creating some theory specifically for the passive role of
consumer of culture. Were you upset by the swiftness of
change? Did it worry you that one moment Abstract
Expressionism was it, the final style, and then, in the
blink of an eye, Abstract Expressionism was demolished and Pop Art was it? It shouldn't, said Steinberg-for that was precisely where the consumer of
culture could show his courage, his mettle, his soldierly
bearing. For what in the world requires more courage
than "to applaud the destruction of values which we
still cherish"? Modern Art always "projects itself into a
twilight zone where no values are fixed," he said. "It is
always born in anxiety." Not only that, he said, it is the
very function of really valuable new Modern Art to
"transmit this anxiety to the spectator," so that when he
looks at it, he is thrown into "a genuine existential
predicament." This was basically Greenberg's line, of
course-"all profoundly original art looks ugly at
first"-but Steinberg made the feeling seem deeper
(and a bit more refined). The clincher was Steinberg's
own confession of how he had at first disliked Johns's
work. He had resisted it. He had fought to cling to his
old values-and then realized he was wrong. This filtered down as a kind of Turbulence Theorem. If a
work of art or a new style disturbed you, it was probably good work. If you hated it-it was probably great.
That was precisely the way Robert Scull discovered
the artist Walter De Maria. Scull was walking down
Madison Avenue on Saturday afternoon when he
stopped in a gallery and saw some drawings that were
nearly blank. They were pieces of drawing paper
Hello, Steinberg
75
framed and hung, and down in one corner would be a
few faint words, seemingly written by an ailing individual with a pencil so hard, a No.8 or something, that
the lead scarcely even made a line: "Water, water, water ... " Scull hated these drawings so profoundly, he
promptly called up the artist and became his patron.
That brought De Maria his first recognition as a Minimal artist.
The Greatest Artist in the History of the World
collapses at the Automat
Up the fundamental aperture
M
INIMAL ART WAS PART OF A COMEBACK THAT AB-
stract art began to make, even while Pop Art was
still going strong. This time around, theory was
more dominant than ever.
I can remember the Museum of Modern Art announcing that it was going to have an exhibition in 1965
called "The Responsive Eye," a show of paintings with
special optical effects-what quickly became known as
Op Art. Quickly is hardly the word for it. A mad rush,
is more like it. Pop Art had been such a smashing success, with so many spin-offs, that it seemed like all of
smart New York was primed, waiting to see what the
art world would come up with next. By the time the
Museum's big Op Art show opened in the fall, two out
of every three women entering the glass doors on West
78
The Painted Word
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Bridget Riley, Current, 1964.
Not Op Art . . . Perceptual Abstraction
Fifty-third Street for the opening-night hoopla were
wearing print dresses that were knockoffs of the paintings that were waiting on the walls inside. In between
the time the show had been announced and the time it
opened, the Seventh Avenue garment industry had
cranked up and slapped the avant-garde into mass production before the Museum could even officially discover it. (They liked knocking off Bridget Riley's fields
of vibrating lines best of all.)
Op, like Pop, was enjoyed for basically "literary" rea-
Up the fundamental aperture
79
sons. All of it, from Vasarely to Larry Poons, was reminiscent of the marvelous optical illusions in the syndicated newspaper feature "Ripley's 'Believe It or Not.' "
But the theory of Op Art was something else. The Op
artists never called it Op Art; they preferred Perceptual
Abstraction. Their argument was: Cubism freed art
from the nineteenth-century view of a painting as a
window through which you saw an illusion of the real
world. Earlier abstract work, such as De Stijl or Abstract Expressionism, had advanced this good work by
establishing the painting as "an independent object as
real as a chair or table" (to quote from "The Responsive
Eye" catalogue). We Perceptual Abstractionists complete the process by turning this art object into a piece
of pure perception. By creating special optical effects
(but on a flat surface!) we remove it from the outside
world and take it into that terra incognita "between the
cornea and the brain.''
Theory really started to roll now ... toward reductionism. In this case: real art is nothing but what happens in your brain. Of course, Greenberg had started it
all with his demands for purity, for flatness (ever more
Flatness!), for the obliteration of distinctions such as
foreground and background, figure and field, line and
contour, color and pattern. Now, in the mid-1960s,
Greenberg made a comeback.
He had learned a thing or two in the meantime about
strategy. He no longer tried to defend Abstract Expressionism against the huge shift in taste that Pop Art represented. In fact, he offered what amounted to a piece
of implied confession or, better said, self-criticism. All
along, he said, there had been something old-fashioned
80
The Painted Word
about Abstract Expressionism, despite the many advances it brought. This old-fashioned thing was ... its
brushstrokes. Its brushstrokes? Yes, said Greenberg, its
brushstrokes. * The characteristic Abstract Expressionist brushstroke was something very obvious, very expressive, very idiosyncratic ... very painterly, like the
"blurred, broken, loose definition of color and contour"
you find in Baroque art. It was as obvious as a skid on
the highway. He termed this stroke the "Tenth Street
touch."
Lichtenstein, the Pop artist, liked this notion so
much, or was so amused by it, that he did a series of
Brushstroke paintings, each one a blowup of a single
"Tenth Street touch" brushstroke, with every swirl and
overloaded driblet represented-but rendered in the
hard, slick commercial-illustration unpainterly style of
Pop, with no brushstrokes of his own whatsoever to be
seen.
Greenberg was still unbending in his opposition to
Pop, but now he knew better than to just denounce it.
Now he added the obligatory phrase: "-and I can
show you something newer and better ... way out
here." This, he said, was Post-Painterly Abstraction.
Greenberg's Post-Painterly Abstraction has gone under other names since then: Hard-Edge-Abstract and
Color Field Abstract, to name two. But all of them can
be defined by the way in which they further the process
of reduction, i.e., the way they get rid of somethingjust a little bit more, if you please! How far we've
" This was also an implicit criticism of his old rival, Rosenberg, the original
prophet of the expressive brushstroke.
Up the fundamental aperture
BJ
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Philippe Durand-Rue/, Reuil, France
lichtenstein's Yellow and Red Brushstrokes, 1966.
Brushstrokes without a single brushstroke showing; a
flat picture of impasto and the old-fashioned Tenth
Street past
come! How religiously we've cut away the fat! In the
beginning we got rid of nineteenth-century storybook
realism. Then we got rid of representational objects.
Then we got rid of the third dimension altogether and
got really flat (Abstract Expressionism). Then we got
rid of airiness, brushstrokes, most of the paint, and the
last viruses of drawing and complicated designs (Hard
Edge, Color Field, Washington School).
Enough? Hardly, said the Minimalists, who began to
come into their own about 1965. Bourgeois connotations, they argued, still hung on to Modern Art like a
82
The Painted VVord
necktie. What about all those nice "lovely" colors that
the Hard Edgers and the Color Fielders used? They invited as many sentimental associations as painterly
brushstrokes had. So Minimalists began using colors
like Tool & Die Works red and Subway 1-Beam green
and Restaurant Exhaust-Fan Duct Lint gray that nobody could accuse of sentimentality. And how about all
those fuzzy, swampy, misty edges that Color Fielders
Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961.
Noland was known as the fastest painter alive (i.e.,
one could see his pictures faster than anybody else's).
The explanation of why that was important took
considerably longer
Up the fundamental aperture
83
like Olitski and Frankenthaler went for? They invited
you to linger over a painting for all its emotional "evocations," just like the worst junk of the old preRaphaelites. Henceforth a paint should be applied only
in hard linear geometries, and you should get the whole
painting at once, "fast," to use the going phrase. (No
Loitering.) Kenneth Noland, formerly of Morris
Louis's misty Washington School, was now considered
the fastest painter in the business.
And how about the painting frame? Wasn't New
York full of artists who made a big thing about treating
the painting as an object-and then acted as if the
frame wasn't even there? So Frank Stella turned the
canvas itself into a frame and hung it on the wall with
nothing in the middle. That got rid of the frames, and
the era of "shaped canvases" began.
Sure, but what about this nice sweet bourgeois idea
of hanging up pictures in the first place ... all in their
nice orderly solid-burgher little rows? ... So artists like
Robert Hunter and Sol Lewitt began painting directly
on the gallery walls or on walls outside the gallery window ... with the faintest, most unsentimental geometric forms imaginable ...
FASTER
AND
FASTER
ART
THEORY
FLEW
NOW,
IN
ever-tighter and more dazzling turns. It was dizzying,
so much so that both Greenberg and Rosenberg were
shocked-epates. Greenberg accused the Minimalists of
living only for "the far-out as an end in itself." Their
work was "too much a feat of ideation ... something
deduced instead of felt and discovered." A little late to
84
The Painted Word
be saying that, Clement! Rosenberg tried to stop them
by saying they really weren't far-out at all-they were
a fake avant-garde, a mere "DMZ vanguard," a buffer
between the real avant-garde (his boy de Kooning) and
the mass media. Very subtle-and absolutely hopeless,
Harold! Theory, with a head of its own now, spun on
and chewed up the two old boys like breadsticks, like
the Revolution devouring Robespierre and Dantonfaster and faster-in ever-tighter and more dazzling
turns-let's see, we just got rid of the little rows of hung
pictures, not to mention a couple of superannuated critics, and we've gotten rid of illusion, representational
objects, the third dimension, pigment (or most of it),
brushstrokes, and now frames and canvas-but what
about the wall itself? What about the very idea of a
work of art as something "on a wall" at all? How very
pre-Modern! How can you treat the wall as something
separate from the gallery, the room, the space in which
it exists?
And so artists like Carl Andre, Robert Morris,
Ronald Bladen, and Michael Steiner did huge geometric (unsentimental, uncolorful, fast) sculptures designed
to divide up the entire gallery into spaces, to make the
very building part of the sculpture in some way. No
more "hanging" an exhibition; these were "installations."
But what about the very idea of the gallery or museum? What about the very notion of a nice sedate
sanctum where one-meaning a person of the proper
gentility-comes to gaze upon Art and the Artist with
a glaze of respect and silence over his mug? Wasn't
there something impossibly retrograde about the whole
Up the fundamental aperture
BS
Private collection, Beverly Hills. Courtesy Leo Castelli Gallery
Tampa (1964) by Fronk Stella, who stood stounchly by
the Word: fast, hard, flat, and unevocative, with
paradise aforethought
thing? So began Earth Art, such as Michael Heizer's
excavations in the dry lakes of the Mojave Desert and
Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake.
By now it was the late 1960s, and the New Left was
in high gear, and artists and theorists began to hail
Earth Art and the like as a blow against "the Uptown Museum-Gallery Complex," after the "militaryindustrial complex" out in the world beyond. If the
capitalists, the paternalists of the art world, can't get
86
The Painted Word
their precious art objects into their drawing rooms or
even into their biggest museums, they've had it. A few
defiant notes like this, plus the signing of a few dozen
manifestos against war and injustice-that was about
as far as New York artists went into Left politics in the
1960s. With everyone now caught up in the spin of
Theory, at such a furious velocity, the notion of putting
on the brakes and doing that 1930s number again,
cranking out some good old Social Realism propaganda, was too impossible to even think about. No, a
few raspberries for the "museum-gallery complex" ...
and let's get back to business.
Back to business ... which in the late 1960s was the
monomaniacal task of reduction. What about the idea of
a permanent work of art at all, or even a visible one?
Wasn't that the most basic of all assumptions of the Old
Order-that art was eternal and composed of objects
that could be passed from generation to generation, like
Columbus's bones? Out of that objection came Conceptual Art.
THE CONCEPTUALISTS LIKED TO PROPOUND THE FOL-
lowing question: Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the
time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at
Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to
cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few
abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some
other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the
Automat went in for-and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the
Up the fundamental aperture
87
world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a
burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of
water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient
being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as
his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water
had diffused through the paper and the grand design
vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of
the world slumped to the table and died of a broken
heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that
here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet
napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the
greatest work of art in the history of the world or not?
The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was.
It's not permanence and materials, all that Winsor &
Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of
art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well
take a walk, too.
Conceptual Art divided into two sorts: things you
could see, but not for long (like the Great Man's water
picture), and things you couldn't see at all. From the
first category came Peter Hutchinson's Arc. He filled
some plastic bags with gas and pieces of rotten calabash
or something of the sort, which was supposed to create
more gas, tied the bags to a rope, put weights on either
end of the rope, threw the whole business into the
ocean, where the weights hit the bottom and the gas
bags rose up, lifting the rope in an arc. An underwater
photographer took pictures of the installation and then
came back periodically to record the decay of the
garbage and the eventual bursting of the bags and col-
88
The Painted Word
lapse of the arc-the disappearance of the art object, in
short. Genius and process-process and genius! The
photographs and quite a few lines of off-scientific prose
provided the documentation, as it is known in Conceptual Art-which Hutchinson thereupon sold to the
Museum of Modern Art for ... well, today Museum officials prefer not to talk about how much they paid for
Arc. One assumes that they paid no more than was necessary to remain buoyant in the turbulent intellectual
waters of the late 1960s.
As for the second category-one of the great outposts
of invisible Conceptual Art was the Richmond Art
Center in Richmond, California, when Tom Marioni
was its director. It was there that I came upon the fabulous Beautiful Toast Dream, by a woman whose name
I can't remember. The documentation, which was
typed, described how she woke up in the dark at about
four in the morning and had a sudden craving for a
piece of toast. The craving was so strong, in fact, that
she could see it, a crust of Wonder Bread done light
brown, and she could already visualize herself taking
the crust out of the toaster and spreading Nucoa margarine on it with a serrated knife with a wooden handle, one of those slender numbers with little teeth on
the blade that are good for cutting tomatoes or grapefruit, and she can see herself putting the Nucoa on the
toast and then sprinkling some white sugar, the usual
kind, on top of that and then shaking some cinnamon
on it and then spreading it all on with the serrated knife
until the heat of the toast begins to melt the margarine
and the teeth of the knife begin to dig little furrows in
the bread and the molten margarine begins to build up
Up the fundamental aperture
89
ahead of each tooth and then runs off between the teeth
and into the furrows-but not by itself!-no, the margarine and little ripped papillae of bread run together
carrying with them on the surface of the tide granules
of sugar that absorb the molten margarine and turn yellow and disappear in this viscous flood of heat, steel,
and fragmented bread papillae while the cinnamon
maintains its spreckled identity except when bunching
up on the oleaginous surface of the flood like a stain
and the crest keeps building but becomes neither fluid
nor solid but more of a blob existing only as a kinetic
wobble swelling into one final macerated mulled mass
reflected in the stainless steel face of the blade as a
tawny cresting wave bound by an unbearable surface
tension until-all at once!-it is ripped, raked, ruptured by the blade and suddenly leaks as if through deflation between the teeth and into the lengthening
furrows behind the blade sinking lamely into a harrowed and utterly swamped tan bread delta and she
knows it is time to bite off a corner of the crust with yellow Nucoa-soaked sugar grains scraping the ridges of
her teeth and caking in the corners of her mouth-but
there were no crusts to be found-and she could have no
toast-and she had to have a swig of Diet-Rite Cola instead-and, well, I mean I can only hint at the tension,
the velocity, the suspense, the meth-like electronmicroscopic eye for detail and le mot juste that this
woman's documentation had-it went on and on; a
certain Frenchman would have given up the silence of
his cork-lined studio to have had one-tenth of this
woman's perception of the minutiae of existence or, in
this case, nonexistence, one-twentieth of her patience,
The Painted Word
90
one-hundredth of her perseverance to stay with the description until the job is truly done-in short, I was in
the presence of ... superb post-Proustian literature!
With works such as that, late twentieth-century
Modern Art was about to fulfill its destiny, which was:
to become nothing less than Literature pure and simple. But the destined terminus had not yet been
reached. After all, the artist of Beautiful Toast Dream
had first gone through a visual experience, even if only
imagined. After all, what about the whole business of
"the visual imagination"? Came the refrain: How very
pre-Modern.
David R. Smith (not the sculptor) tried to get rid of
this, one of the last pieces of the old bourgeois baggage,
through a piece called "Vacant":
CA
TN
NT
AC
Collection, Museum of Conceptual Art
-which was calculated to make the viewer concentrate on the utter emptiness between the letters. But he
failed. He had still committed an act of visual imagination, even though in the service of invisibility,
emptiness, nihilism. He had not gotten rid of the fun-
Up the fundamental aperture
9J
damental, the primary, the indigenous, the intrinsic, the
built-in, the unitary and atomic impurity of the whole
enterprise: namely, the artistic ego itself.
So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named
Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared
in Arts Magazine-as a work of art-with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:
1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built
Each being equal and consistent with the intent
of the artist the decision as to condition rests with
the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.
With permission, Arts Magazine
And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more
representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms,
and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face
of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a
"receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or
may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the
artist," in the third person, who may be anyone or no
one at all, for nothing is demanded of him, nothing at
all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode-and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art
made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an
ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one
last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disap-
92
The Painted Word
peared up its own fundamental aperture ... and came
out the other side as Art Theory! ... Art Theory pure
and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.
Epilogue
F
OR ABOUT SIX YEARS NOW, REALISTIC PAINTERS OF
all sorts, real nineteenth-century types included,
with 3-D and all the other old forbidden sweets,
have been creeping out of their Stalags, crawl spaces, DP
camps, deserter communes, and other places of exile,
other Canadas of the soul-and have begun bravely exhibiting. They have been emboldened by what has
looked to them, as one might imagine, as the modern art
of Art Theory gone berserk.
The realist school that is attracting the most attention
is an offshoot of Pop Art known as Photo-Realism. The
Photo-Realists, such as Robert Bechtle and Richard
Estes, take color photos of Pop-like scenes and objects-cars, trailers, storefronts, parking lots, motorcycle engines-then reproduce them precisely, in paint,
94
The Painted Word
on canvas, usually on a large scale, often by projecting
them onto the canvas with a slide projector and then
going to work with the paint. One of the things they
manage to accomplish in this way, beyond the slightest
doubt, is to drive orthodox critics bananas.
Such denunciations! "Return to philistinism" ...
Epilogue
Collection Mr. and Mrs. Saul Steinberg. Courtesy Alan Stone Gallery
Richard Estes, Bus Reflection, 1972.
Perhaps the leading Photo-Realist, or at any rate the
most richly denounced; if the power to cause cortical
blowouts in critics is any recommendation,
he can't miss
95
96
The Painted Word
"triumph of mediocrity" ... "a visual soap opera" ...
"The kind of academic realism Estes practices might
well have won him a plaque from the National Academy of Design in 1890" ... "incredibly dead paintings" ... "rat-trap compositional formulas" ... "its
subject matter has been taken out of its social context
and neutered" ... "it subjects art itself to ignominy" ...
all quotes taken from reviews of Estes's show in New
York last year ... and a still more fascinating note is
struck: "This is the moment of the triumph of mediocrity; the views of the silent majority prevail in the galleries as at the polls."
Marvelous. We are suddenly thrust back fifty years
into the mental atmosphere of Royal Cortissoz himself,
who saw an insidious connection between the alien
hordes from Southern Europe and the alien wave of
"Ellis Island art." Only the carrier of the evil virus has
changed: then, the subversive immigrant; today, the ne
kulturny native of the heartland.
Photo-Realism, indeed! One can almost hear
Clement Greenberg mumbling in his sleep: "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first ... but there is
ugly and there is ugly!" ... Leo Steinberg awakes with
a start in the dark of night: "Applaud the destruction of
values we still cherish! But surely-not this!" And
Harold Rosenberg has a dream in which the chairman
of the Museum board of directors says: "Modernism is
finished! Call the cops!"
Somehow a style to which they have given no support at all ("lacks a persuasive theory") is selling. "The
New York galleries fairly groan at the moment under
the weight of one sort of realism or another" ... "the
Epilogue
97
incredible prices" ... Estes is reported to be selling at
$80,000 a crack ... Bechtle for £20,000 at auction in
London ... Can this sort of madness really continue "in
an intellectual void"?
Have the collectors and artists themselves abandoned
the very flower of twentieth-century art: i.e., Art Theory? Not yet. The Photo-Realists assure the collectors
that everything is okay, all is kosher. They swear: we're
not painting real scenes but, rather, camera images
("not realism, photo systems"). What is more, we don't
show you a brushstroke in an acre of it. We're painting
only scenes of midday, in bland sunlight-so as not to
be "evocative." We've got all-over "evenness" such as
you wouldn't believe-we put as much paint on that
postcard sky as on that Airstream Silver Bullet trailer in
the middle. And so on, through the checklist of Late
Modernism. The Photo-Realists are backsliders, yes;
but not true heretics.
In all of Cultureburg, in fact, there are still no
heretics of any importance, no one attacking Late Modernism in its very foundation-not even at this late
hour when Modern Art has reached the vanishing
point and our old standby, Hilton Kramer, lets slip the
admission: Frankly, these days, without a theory to go
with it, I can't see a painting.
" LETS
SLIP, " AS I SAY. WE NOW KNOW, OF COURSE,
that his words describe the actual state of affairs for tout
le monde in Cultureburg; but it is not the sort of thing
that one states openly. Any orthodox critic, such as
Kramer, is bound to defend the idea that a work of art
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The Painted Word
can speak for itself. Thus in December 1974 he attacked the curators of the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition "The Impressionist Epoch" for putting big
historical notes up on the wall beside the great masterworks of the Impressionists. But why? What an opportunity he missed! If only he could have drawn upon the
wisdom of his unconscious! Have the courage of your
secret heart, Hilton! Tell them they should have made
the copy blocks bigger!-and reduced all those Manets,
Monets, and Renoirs to the size of wildlife stamps!
Twenty-five years from now, that will not seem like
such a facetious idea. I am willing (now that so much
has been revealed!) to predict that in the year 2000,
when the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art
puts on the great retrospective exhibition of American
Art 1945-75, the three artists who will be featured, the
three seminal figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de
Kooning, and Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and
Steinberg. Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks,
eight and a half by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of the period ... a little "fuliginous flatness" here ... a little "action painting" there ... and
some of that "all great art is about art" just beyond. Beside them will be small reproductions of the work of
leading illustrators of the Word from that period, such
as Johns, Louis, Noland, Stella, and Olitski. (Pollock
and de Kooning will have a somewhat higher status, although by no means a major one, because of the more
symbiotic relationship they were fortunate enough to
enjoy with the great Artists of the Word.)
Every art student will marvel over the fact that a
whole generation of artists devoted their careers to get-
Epilogue
99
ting the Word (and to internalizing it) and to the extraordinary task of divesting themselves of whatever there
was in their imagination and technical ability that did
not fit the Word. They will listen to art historians say,
with the sort of smile now reserved for the study of
Phrygian astrology: "That's how it was then!"-as they
describe how, on the one hand, the scientists of the midtwentieth century proceeded by building upon the discoveries of their predecessors and thereby lit up the
sky ... while the artists proceeded by averting their
eyes from whatever their predecessors, from da Vinci
on, had discovered, shrinking from it, terrified, or disintegrating it with the universal solvent of the Word.
The more industrious scholars will derive considerable
pleasure from describing how the art-history professors
and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so
many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in
the old pre-World War II way, like Plato's cave
dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what
had projected them, which was the Word.
What happy hours await them all! With what sniggers, laughter, and good-humored amazement they
will look back upon the era of the Painted Word!